Determination of shear strength of steel shear walls with three different vertical stress distributions for considering the gravity load effect

Abstract

The gravity load will reduce the shear strength of a steel shear wall (SSW) under a wind load or an earthquake load. However, this effect is not considered in practice and may lead to potential danger. In this work, three assumed distributions of vertical stress due to the gravity load, i.e. 1) cosine distribution, 2) effective width model and 3) three-segment distribution, were considered. The stress throughout the inclined tensile strip, considering the effect of different vertical stress distributions, is determined using the Von Mises yield criterion. The shear strength is calculated by integrating the shear stress along the width. To evaluate the proposed approach with different vertical stress distributions a finite element model using the software LS-DYNA is developed. The results show that the three-segment distribution is able to describe the effect of gravity load of the SSWs of different aspect ratios and slenderness ratios, while that of the cosine distribution and the effective width model will underestimate the shear strength.